Starlight Feast

The cargo ship Ironclad shuddered as it skimmed the magnetosphere of a young neutron star, drawn by the promise of unparalleled energy yields. Dr. Vanya Petrov watched from the engineering deck as spectrometers detected rising concentrations of heavy elements—iron, gold, platinum—plucked from the star’s plasma.

Outside the window, the neutron star’s gravity stretched the hull into elongated filaments. The mining lasers harvested atoms at quantum scales, morphing them into luminous streams. Petrov’s comm crackled: “Warning: structural integrity at 60 percent.” But the data was too valuable to abandon; each flake of metal shimmered with raw starlight.

In the control chamber’s holo-projection, the refinery array glowed with molten arcs of charged particles. The crew listlessly monitored thermal fluctuations as shards of metal vapor danced in prismatic arcs.